Design and evaluation of rotational type of tripod parallel mechanism for motion base

The Stewart-Gough platform type of the parallel mechanism is conventionally used as a motion base for many industrial applications. The disadvantage of the conventional Stewart-Gough platform is to have small tilt angles of the motion base. A rotational type of tripod parallel mechanism which has three legs rotating on ground is proposed and developed for the new motion base. A virtual motion simulator and a scale model have been developed to evaluate the motion of the mechanisms. The developed scale model of the tripod parallel mechanism has high positioning accuracy for the motion base. The analytical results by simulation show that the tripod parallel mechanism has larger tilt angles and can achieve higher Dexterity than the conventional Stewart-Gough platform type of the parallel mechanism.